What is a Heading 1 - Part Two
Following on from last week’s blog What is a H1 which covered how to create good headings in a piece of content, here we have part two which goes into a little more detail on why we need to optimise Heading tags and how we then add these tags to a website.
H2: Why do I need to use SEO Optimised Heading Tags?
You might be thinking, “Why do I need to add heading tags to my content, can’t I just make the heading bold and adjust the size of the font?” This is a question that we get asked a lot, and quite rightly adding these indicators will make the text look bigger and in a bold font when it is published. The reason you need to add the appropriate heading tags to your page is to ensure it’s structured correctly for Google to quickly find out which headings are more important than others, and find out exactly what your content is about and exactly what different topics are within the content. Having these tags structured correctly within your content will assist Google when deciding what it should rank that page for.
H3: Content Without Heading Tags
As you can see from the image above, showing content before heading tags and content after. The content without heading tags is not well structured and is hard to find out what it is about without giving it a thorough read. Heading tags also help your readers follow the content and navigate to parts in the content that are of interest to them.
H2: How Do I add Heading Tags to My HTML code?
Adding the appropriate heading tag to your page is easily done within your sites CMS system. Log into your Content Management System and find the page you want to optimise with heading tags. If it’s a new page that is not currently on your site, click to create a new page/ blog post.Follow the steps below for adding heading tags to your content.H2: How to add a H1 tag In the HTML CodeStart by clicking on the </> symbol within the CMS, this will take you to the HTML code for the webpage. Here is where you can add all the heading tags. Identify where you want to add the heading and enter the following (The Heading 1 tag should be at the top of the page):<h1>NAME OF HEADING 1</h1>
Once you have added the <h1> tag, if you switch back to the text version of the content in the CMS by clicking on the </> symbol, you should see the H1 title added to the top of the page.
H3: How to add an H2 tag to your web page?
Once you have added the H1 tag ( the title of the page) you can start by adding the H2 heading titles. To do this, you need to follow the same steps for adding an H1 tag (going to the HTML code, identifying where you want the heading and adding the h2 tag) but just change the tag name to <h2>, like the example below.<h2>NAME OF HEADING 1</h2>
Below is what the H2 tag should look like on the page itself. As you can see the text is slightly smaller than the H1 text, this is because is is the H2 tag is the second most important in the hierarchical structure. You can add as many <h2> headings to your page as you think appropriate.
H3: How to Add H3-H6 tags
If your content needs further sub-headings or sub-sub heading to help categorise the points on the page, you can add H3-H6 tags. H5 and H6 tags should only be used on large pieces of content like a whitepaper, online brochure or essential guide. To do this you just change the prefix in the HTML code to the following.
<h3>NAME OF HEADING 1</h3>
<h4>NAME OF HEADING 1</h4>
<h5>NAME OF HEADING 1</h5>
<h6>NAME OF HEADING 1</h6>
The general rule of thumb is that only one H1 tag should be added per page, as this acts as the page title for the content. You can use as many H2, H3, H4 etc. tags as you think are appropriate for the page, depending on the length of the content.
We hope you have found this blog useful for implementing heading tags for SEO and how to go about it. If you have any questions about adding SEO driven heading titles to your webpage or blog post, feel free to contact us at [email protected]
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